Convince me to switch from Ubiquiti

We'd been to this client several times over the last couple years, trying to tweak things. They were coming up to their yearly renewal anniversary - and were considering not renewing this year.  I switched them to Cambium and here is the result.

http://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/ePMP-2000-and-1000/ePMP-2-4Ghz-Performance/m-p/56574#U56574

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try epmp1000 from cambium

UBNT- Pros: "Disruptive Pricing", Very Wide Range of products, Air Fiber, Semi 1 stop shop for Install supplies,  Cable, Ends and Mounts. Fast RMA Process

UBNT- Cons: Scattered company direction with addition of solar, Only real support is in the Forum and this is ruined by the Alpha users in some cases assuming "You must know better", Virus outbreak twice now, Constant degredation in XM/XW line with newer FW's, No functioning GPS, Long turn around on announced products, Poor explanation of some features, Managment software and its endless beta......Honestly I could go on and on.

We have 3500+ UBNT SM's and 300ish UBNT AP sectors, and are preparing to do a complete overhaul to the EPMP line. And for now the only UBNT devices we plan to keep are the AirFibers due to their low cost and high throughput (AF24 series)

The thing that convinced me was the Feature set is working on deployment, No more announced product features that are not delivered on purchase. We were supposed to have GPS Sync (AirSync) in the Titanium line, this was a complete joke as the radios were complete junk. We should have jumped ship after their lack of product testing with the first run of tough cable. After less than a year we had this cable start completly failing due to the jacket discentigrating in the sun.

We have decived that its time to stop playing with the inexperienced and "Flashy" UBNT and move to a company who knows what they are doing, as well as a company who stands behind their products.

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@Tandr06

All great points and that is pretty much spot on as to why we are switching. I think we will stick with the AirFibers for the backhauls for now, and possibly even keep the 5ghz on ubnt for the time being. Hardest part for is, is being a small WISP with limited funds. I wish we wouldve started out with Cambium. Now we'll be stuck with a bunch of Ubiquti gear in the warehouse. We will be swapping our ubnt365 gear to Cambium ePMP1000 2.4ghz products soon.


@bleger wrote:

@Tandr06

All great points and that is pretty much spot on as to why we are switching. I think we will stick with the AirFibers for the backhauls for now, and possibly even keep the 5ghz on ubnt for the time being. Hardest part for is, is being a small WISP with limited funds. I wish we wouldve started out with Cambium. Now we'll be stuck with a bunch of Ubiquti gear in the warehouse. We will be swapping our ubnt365 gear to Cambium ePMP1000 2.4ghz products soon.


@bleger 

We have been through a few generations of radios, Rocket Wave (A cheap board in a cheap box for $200), SmartBridges, Cyclones (Early Canopy), Canopy and Canopy Advantage, Tranzeos, Ubiquitis and Now cambiums. It is very hard to predict what will be the next line of gear that will fit best for you. Most of the products listed above served their purpose and carried us through to the next generation.

The main reason for my rant on ubiquiti, is that in the 20 years we have been a Wisp, the failures we have seen with Ubiquitis gear are kind of a stand out. I still have Cicso Aironet 500's on the network, because they still work well for what we need in those very few areas. Ubiquiti is systematically crippiling their equipment, at a pace that almost feels intentional. I still have some old Canopy 5400AP's and 5700AP's on the network running P9 and P10 boards. They work just as well as the day we got them and have been reliable.

I share the desire to go back and stick with Cambium, but the core issue is the pricepoint of Cambium's previously did not make for efficent expansion in rural areas. On a site with less than 100 people I cannot justify spending $5000 on a 450 AP and sector. Ubiquiti drove down the pricepoint and made the market more competitive. I am very happy that cambium in continuing their excellent support, manufacturing and product quality at this lower pricepoint.

---Phew-- Rant over.

Tandr06 

On the flip side... I have NEVER seen a post or a topic heading (in this forum, the UBNT forum, or any other for that matter) that says... 'Convince me to switch away from Cambium'. or 'Done with Cambium, convince me to switch to Ubiquiti'.

That's saying alot!

Tandr06! Try out ePMP! It's a great way to start you down the Cambium path, and there's tools to help you migrate your legacy Ubiquiti M series radios over to ePMP. I think you'll never look back. We didn't!

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Eric Ozrelic wrote:

On the flip side... I have NEVER seen a post or a topic heading (in this forum, the UBNT forum, or any other for that matter) that says... 'Convince me to switch away from Cambium'. or 'Done with Cambium, convince me to switch to Ubiquiti'.

That's saying alot!

Tandr06! Try out ePMP! It's a great way to start you down the Cambium path, and there's tools to help you migrate your legacy Ubiquiti M series radios over to ePMP. I think you'll never look back. We didn't!


We are actually in the process. 2 1000's in place sharing the same channel, And I am on it as well. I have always taken the approach that If I am unhappy on the service a customer will be as well. So far everything is going great. We have 40 Force 200's coming in to load up the sectors and see how peaktime bandwidth looks. We ran into the issue with UBNT gear that after about 15-20 customers are on an AP, there is a BW cap of about 25Mb (sorry if I did the sign for date size rather than transfer rate)

We are very excited, and have already decided that all of our new AP's/POP's are going to be Cambium AP's


@Eric Ozrelic wrote:

On the flip side... I have NEVER seen a post or a topic heading (in this forum, the UBNT forum, or any other for that matter) that says... 'Convince me to switch away from Cambium'. or 'Done with Cambium, convince me to switch to Ubiquiti'.

That's saying alot!

Tandr06! Try out ePMP! It's a great way to start you down the Cambium path, and there's tools to help you migrate your legacy Ubiquiti M series radios over to ePMP. I think you'll never look back. We didn't!


LMAO.     the only argument I've ever heard was cheeper upfront cost... and I don't think I've ever heard of any complany saving money in the long run.  (from a provider standpoint)

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can you please clarify, whn you put 40 custopers in 1 cambium AP what throuhput you are providing?

We provide

3/.5
6/1
9/1.5
15/5
25/5

On out ptmp and are planning on upping all of those plans this summer. We’ve got epmp APs with well over 40 and capacity to spare, and we’ve got a few at 30 filled with heavy users that are full. We run 20 mix channels most of the time and switch to 40 if needed. On 2.4 we use 10 mix and switch to 20 as needed.

Rather youve got 1 or 50 subs, you’ll get your speed. If all 50 subs hold mcs16 for the downlink, you’ll see 100 mbps agro avaliable. And stable latency

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Chris - is this with 1000 or 2000 APs?

We offer plans similar to Chris... 6/1, 9/1, 19/1... and some custom mixes.

I just checked our highest loaded 5GHz ePMP AP... we have 40 subs on it. It's an ePMP 1000 GPS 5GHz using a 20MHz channel width, GPS sync, using a 75/25 split, and 5ms frame size. It's pushing around 43mbps on the downlink @ peak, and around 4mbps on the uplink at peak.

No complaints from anyone on the sector... still putting new subs on it :-)

We also have a somewhat over-loaded 2.4ghz ePMP AP @ 20mhz channel width, flexible/5ms frames... it has 53 subs on it. It's pushing around 41mbps on the downlink @ peak, and around 5mbps on the uplink at peak.

This sector has mostly lower end plans on it and we try not to put any new subs on it. No complaints from anyone on the sector, but we can tell through our latency monitoring system that things get a little dicey in the eve's.

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@jakkwb wrote:

Chris - is this with 1000 or 2000 APs?


its a mix. 

the 2000 is the same data rates of the 1000 gear, the 2000 handles noise much better than the 1000. aisde from that, there is no diffrerence.  

we still deploy 1000s out in remote areas and 2000s are always used in town.   you can mix and match 1000 and 2000s on the same tower as well. 

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Chris_Bay wrote: The 2000 handles noise much better than the 1000. aisde from that, there is no diffrerence.  


Jakkwb - in addition to Chris' awesome (as usual) replies and help - I'd like to clarify and add that the ePMP 2000 not only handles noise better, but also generates less noise in a better way than other radios. It has a dynamically programmed filter in it, so when you program it for a certain channel and width, the radio will hear very little 'next door channel' interference, but just as importantly, t'll also generate very little 'next door channel' type of interference. In other words - the filter will help make the channel edges 'square' as much as possible, and it can generate far less noise for your other 5ghz gear that can better co-exist on nearby channels.  :)

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Hello, first of all welcome to the community.
Use the GPS sync AP when you are collocating more than 1 AP on the same Tower or when you have two sites which are close with each other and they could interfere. You have a much better spectrum efficiency as tou can re-utilize the same channel at 180 degree (back to back ABAB).
On top of this you are going to have more REAL throughput and more SM oer sector, we have depkoyment with 100+ SMs…I would use ePMP2000 as it can e “upgraded” with beamfoarming antenna which will boost performances in the uplink in a RF envinronment with a lot of interference.
Last but bot least, you may want to elevate your network by using elevate sw license which willallow a UBNT sM to connect with a Cambium AP, also inthis case you can boost your network performances without replacing the UBNT SM… just test ePMP system and you will let us know…
Best regards

Hi bleger

More than a year ago we had over 3000x customers on a Ubiquiti network and also had endless problems and could not provide a reliable service we could be proud of.

We started testing Cambium ePMP on towers we had problems on and could see a MASSIVE improvement on total throughput per AP/sector, number of customers we could connect per AP/sector and overall reliability/stability of the network.

We have since changed most of our Ubiquiti customers to Cambium ePMP and Elevate (should switch the last over the next two months) and have since added over 1000x new customers on Cambium ePMP to the network.

You do not need GPS sync if you are only going to install a single Cambium ePMP AP/sector as GPS sync helps all your own APs to work better together and not cause colocation interference.

If your budget allows for this, I would however recommend you rather get the ePMP 2000 AP for 3 main reasons:
1) I can assure you that you will be happy with the performance of Cambium ePMP products and will soon change more APs on the same tower from Ubiquiti to Cambium. Then the GPS sync would enable you to sync the tx&rx of all Cambium APs on the same tower without replacing hardware in the future.
2) In very noisy environments the ePMP2000 works better than the ePMP1000 because of the Dynamic Filter. This helps you still operate a stable network with strong interference on neighbouring channels. The filter also works on the TX side and will make neighbouring channels work better for other radios you (or others) have on the same tower.
3) You have the option to add the Smart Antenna at a later stage for increased customer upload throughput and reliability without having to replace any hardware.

If you are unsure about spending the money on the ePMP2000 right now, go for the ePMP1000 without GPS to see how good it works!

Do not go to all your customers to replace Ubiquiti stations with Cambium Force200 SMs. You can upgrade them to Cambium Elevate firmware remotely and connect them to your new Cambium sector. It’ll save you money on the replacement hardware and travel expenses and also sale you A LOT of time to do the upgrade to get happy customers sooner.

We have thousands of Ubiquiti PowerBeam M5-400 customer radios loaded with Cambium Elevate firmware. We are not able to see any performance difference between these radios and bew customers making use of Cambium Force 200 SMs.


Ubiquiti had a bug on their firmware a few years ago where port forwarding did not work. We followed all the channels (forum, support, email, etc) to get Ubiquiti to sort this out. They never even bothered to reply or fix the problem after more than 4 months.

With Cambium we have access to country and regional Cambium staff. They provide excellent service and actually care about their customers!


Cambium’s products are of a much higher build quality with much less returns and warranty replacements we had with Ubiquiti.


When Cambium release newer generation equipment, one of their main goals is backwards compatibility. This means you do not have to replace customer CPEs when upgrading towers to a newer technology. You also don’t need to run the old and new generation APs on the same tower and waste more frequencies. I’ve heard rumours that the current ePMP SMs will also be compatible with the next generation ePMP APs currently in development.


We recently upgraded one of our towers with 19x Ubiquiti APs to Cambium ePMP because of self interference and capacity problems. We now have all existing customers and a lot of newly installed customers getting better throughput and reliability than before with only 5x 90deg Cambium ePMP2000 sectors (using only 3x 20MHz channels)!


We have not been sorry for switching our network to Cambium for a single moment!!

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Hi everybody

Thanks a lot for sharing your experiences. We are in a very similar situation, having to make decision between Ubnt and Camibium.

We want to start to offer WISP services as an add-on to our existing service offering. The service will be offered in Rural and Urban areas and we are looking for a reliable solution, price comes second. Some of the sites are far away hence the maintenance trips are difficult. But of course we still need to be competitive; hence we cannot select the most expensive equipment on the market. But we want to make the right investment decision.

We do need the full reporting system also, to maintain and manage the network. Bandwidth control, token generation for data access, alarm notification. Initial scope is to roll out 7 urban sites and 4 rural sites. Servicing about 200 users.

Can somebody point me in the right direction here please?

I read a lot of forms, but many posts are old. Is the UBNT AC with GPS really the game changer? The tools from UBNT like UNMS and UCRM look quite impressive. I know the Cambium  cnMaestro offers also the network management side, but what tool can one use for billing? (The UCRM equivalent)

Thanks a lot.

Kind regards

Reinhold

Anybody some input on the above question? Any help or pointers would be much appreciated. Regards Reinhold

Unfortunately your question has a massive amount of if then situations.

Speaking of the technology, yes gps is a massive game changer. Thats why cambium has had it profected 15 ish years ago.

Ubnt finally getting gps down did catch them up in that reguard and in a noise free environment, with 50 to 55db signals, on like channel sizes and few cpes, all of max modulation, they can out perform epmp. That being said, you wont be able to get every sub below 60, or relisticly below 70 in rural markets. Ubnt ac doesnt handle low rssi well competitively speaking. It generally can’t handle noise as well either. Epmp2000 with beam steering would be an entirely different class of noise performance ubnt hasn’t gotten to yet. Epmp is a much older platform and its much more developed, and real world noise and link situations, cambiums going to win 4 outta 5 times with a tie on tha last 1 out of 5.

Ubnt has more cpes to choose from, more gain selections.

Cambium has fewer options, but the bases are more than covered. A small cpe (force180) a semi small and cheap dish (force 190) and a larger 18" dish force200. If that’s not enough, get the connectorized and use what ever you want.

Cambium wins for sector performance as well, more even return loss, more consistent gain, better x pol isolation and front to back. KP performance makes the best, but has the price tag to mach.

Physical path obstructions, again cambium. We can run epmp through trees and hold mcs15 so long as we’ve got the needed cnr and rssi. Ubnt doesn’t handle that well at all. You will have to have near los or clear los. I do not recommend trying to punch through more than 1 to 1 1/2 trees at short range until you’ve got a feel for your environment. Every tree is different. The epmp2.4 system is great for tree punch and is also matured with some cpe options.


Your management systems… that can be debated all day. We like freeside and netxms. We use cambiums for bulk firmware and network changes as well as reporting on the cpes. Netxms does most of our critical stuff.

Billing, there are a lot and id suggest trying them all. I don’t know one user who has. Scaled network using ubnts tho. Power code, freeside plenty of others out there. All have a good cost on them, but they all seem to be a good value when you really look at it.

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Thanks a lot Chris for the info. It is much apprecaited.

Kind regards Reinhold